


At Day's End

by ygrainette



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Croatoan/Endverse, Episode: s05e04 The End, F/F, Fallen Anna
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 19:10:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1237741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ygrainette/pseuds/ygrainette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 2014 and the end is nigh. Jo rides off to fight their losing battles; Anna waits and watches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Day's End

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sort-of AU of the End!verse, inspired by [this Tumblr post.](http://rebelhael.tumblr.com/post/60594088192)
> 
> I love feedback with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. I [tumble.](http://capricorn-child.tumblr.com)  
> Entirely un-beta'd, all mistakes are my own.
> 
> Content warning for off-screen violence and all the angst implied by it being set in the End!verse.

It's cold – not the kind of cold that burns as you breathe in, vehement, but the kind that simply lurks, ill-tempered and non-committal – and there's a fine mist of rain in the air, the wind coming in fits and starts. What Anna Milton's mother used to call _end of the world weather._ As Eliot said, it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The chill is all-pervasive, inescapable. Even when the generator's working, the space heaters in the cabins haven't the power to drive it out. Autumn's bad, at Chitaqua, but winter's worse, and it's on its way.

Anna drags a bare foot through the prickle of wet grass, wonders if they'll lose anyone to the winter this time around, the way they lost Daryl last year. The shock of that loss, the discovery of that stone-quiet unmarked corpse, it still lives in her bones. Millions of deaths at the hands of evangelical-ecstatic demons, the earthquakes that follow in the wake of Lucifer's footsteps, the plague of Croatoan: all this, she'd been anticipating from the moment she felt the Grace-deep shockwave as the Cage opened. She knew to expect the epic, angelic scale of the apocalypse.

It's the banal, human scale of it that's been her undoing.

From somewhere in the camp, behind Anna's cabin, Chuck wanders over. He's holding an umbrella, a neon pink one covered with the logo of some breast cancer charity that no longer exists. "Oh, hey – you want to borrow this?"

"I'm fine." It's just the rain. She remembers kissing Lucia, her first girlfriend, in the rain outside the cinema. She remembers Michael holding her hand as they watched the first rain fall over the bare newborn earth. (Except he wasn't holding her hand, of course, they didn't have hands at all, but it's the nearest her trapped human mind can get to the reality of trueform existence.)

Chuck shrugs, looks like he's about to say something, then doesn't. He follows the direction of her gaze, sighs. The porch of the cabin Anna shares with Jo faces the mud track out of Chitaqua, the gate topped with razor wire. "It's not gonna make them get back any faster, Anna."

He has a gift for stating the obvious, this prophet-no-longer-a-prophet. "I know."

It's been three days. Three days since Jo drove off with Risa and Dean and Cas and the rest of them, assault rifles and home-cooked dynamite in hand, answering the call of the Army, making a last stand in defence of what remains of Kansas City. Three days, and sitting and staring at the empty road won't make a shred of difference, but Anna will do it anyway.

"I'm sure they'll be back soon," Chuck tells her, trying for a comforting tone of voice. It'd be more effective if he sounded at all convinced.

Anna doesn't reply. Chuck hovers for a moment more, then heads off, perhaps to take yet another neurotic inventory of the food stocks, the medical supplies, the ever-dwindling hoard of gasoline. She pushes her numbed hands deeper into the falling-to-pieces pockets of her leather jacket, rubs her feet through the grass, against each other. Waits.

It's the end of the world and there's nothing else to be done.

Three days, and it's so hard not to obsess, to keep down the faint tinnitus whine of her fear. Jo's gone on countless missions through the last five years – even through the last two after Anna grew sick of the violence and the killing and stopped going herself – and has always made it out alive. Each time a little colder, a little harder, a little more scar tissue on her soul, but alive. That run of luck can't last forever.

One day is going to be the day the pathetic convoy of 4-by-4s crawls back through that gate and Dean – or perhaps he'd send Cas – will tell her Jo is dead.

The death of one more human shouldn't matter after the six billion that went before her, but it does. It does. The Devil is, as he always has been, in the details.

Anna sits, waits. Feels the cold and the damp seep into her joints, the aching place where her collarbone broke three years ago and never quite healed right. She whistles to herself, a thin pale sound. Once she'd sung among the stars, the choir of her brothers and sisters, all in a harmony so complex it was Sappho and Shakespeare and Sagan at once.

And she remembers that, after a fashion. Remembers that Castiel and Uriel and Balthazar had been near her always, following her lead, that the Archangels' voices had resonated through all the dimensions of her, overpowering in their beauty. But she can't bring herself back to it, the way she can with the memories of singing in Daddy's church, of dancing with Lucia at college parties. The human she is now can't reconcile with the angel she was once.

She might sing to pass the time, if she could find the words these days. Used to do that when she still drove with Jo along miles of cracked highway, shotgun in her lap. After the radio networks went down, she'd sing them all the way to the next abandoned mall, the next Croatoan-besieged small town, the next demon nest. Maybe they left the songs out there, ground to dust beneath bloodied tyres.

It gets dark, slowly. Jane walks by, huddled into the over-sized raincoat her husband died wearing. She tells Anna, "I've killed one of Libby's rabbits, gonna make a stew. You want to come join?"

"I'm not hungry, but thanks." Anna Milton was a vegetarian, had been since she was seven years old. Nowadays it's a cardinal sin to waste food, but the thought of eating meat upsets her worse than ever. She was there when Lucifer, smiling, watched as Los Angeles became an abattoir at his bidding. She's seen a lot since then, but even so, even at the end of the world, it's not the kind of thing one forgets.

There's a can of carrot and coriander soup waiting for her in the cabin, she'll have that when it's grown too dark to watch the track and the gate. Last time Jo and Dean and Risa went on a serious supply run, Jo came back with a crate full of cans of that soup. It had been Anna's favourite, until she spent two months eating it, once or twice a day, every day.

She'd still rather another bowl of soup than rabbit stew, but it's getting to be a fairly close-run thing.

With the encroaching dark, the cold is deepening, too. Becoming fiercer. It nips at her feet, promising frostbite winters, and Anna draws them up onto the porch, sits on them. Rainwater creeps through her hair, slides down her neck. Her back is aching from hours of sitting unsupported on a hardwood porch.

Jane appears again, smelling of woodsmoke and burnt meat. "Are you _sure_ you don't want any stew, hon?"

"Really, yes." Anna tries for a smile.

"You can bring your soup, I'll heat it on the fire – you shouldn't be out here in the cold and the wet, catch your death." The mother instinct runs deep in Jane Rawls, the way it used to in Dean Winchester.

"I'll be fine, I promise." After all, last year Daryl died of the winter, and he'd been in a cabin wrapped up in blankets at the time, for crying out loud. Anna's given up on expecting the details of who dies and when and why to make sense.

Jane hesitates, but after all, it's windy and cold and raining, and she soon tugs her dead husband's raincoat tighter and darts away. Anna rubs at her eyes and keeps her vigil.

It's like being a little girl, sitting at the window and waiting for her friends to come play, sick with excitement. Like being a little older, waiting for Lucia or Kath or Jas to pick her up, jittery with the irrational certainty that _this_ would be the time she'd get stood up. Like being a painfully idealistic college student, watching footage of refugee camps and natural disasters and crying with how much she wanted to help, and knew she couldn't. Like being captain of the Garrison, and hovering soundlessly, motionlessly, over Earth, allowed only to watch as humanity bled and cried and suffered.

She thinks, not for the first time, that Lucifer knew what he was doing when he touched two searingly cold fingertips to her forehead and made her human.

When Anna's hands and feet are numb, and she can barely see where the edge of the fence meets the sky, she stretches, joints creaking, and stands. Time to admit defeat, to resign herself to another restless, fruitless night of waiting, worrying. Doing her best not to picture blonde hair matted with blood, bodies in a Kansas City mass grave.

She turns her back on the trail, runs her hands through her tangled hair, moves to open the door to the cabin – and that's when she hears the cars.

When she lived as a human, she was never a car girl. Her uncle claimed he could tell a Ford from a Honda by ear alone, and it'd always bemused her. Now, though, after two years of hearing them and no vehicles other than them, she'd know the sound of _those_ engines anywhere. Hears them in her dreams, even.

The gate creaks, screeches, as it opens, and then the three Land Rovers they liberated from the Army are growling their way back into the camp, headlights strafing through the dark. Anna watches them come to a halt in the mud, nails digging into her palms, heart in her mouth.

 _Let her be alive, let her be alive_.

Dean emerges from the first car, bedraggled and with a face like thunder, slamming the driver's side door shut. He looks around, and when his gaze catches on Anna he doesn't make a move toward her, just nods and throws up a brief salute before stalking off. Cas appears from the other side of the car, staggering slightly – woozy but not wasted – and he doesn't acknowledge Anna at all, just follows in Dean's wake the way he always does, a resentful moon orbiting a dead-eyed star.

They didn't say anything to her. Anna clenches her fists tighter, swallows hard against the traitorous rise of hope. They'd surely have come over, said something, told her if Jo were dead? They can't be that far gone? Anna might be the only person Dean genuinely respects these days: he's held her in something like awe since she Fell trying to kill his brother, Fell failing to achieve what he could not bring himself to even attempt. He'd tell her if anything happened to Jo, she has to believe that.

Except she doesn't believe in anything anymore.

When the door on the driver's side of the second car opens and a slim figure steps out, hair gleaming bright even in the evening murk, the relief hits Anna like a physical blow. She leans back against the cabin wall, tips her head back, closes her eyes, breathes and breathes and breathes. Listens to the squelch of footsteps as Jo walks over to her. Rain drips off the edge of the cabin roof, runs down her face like tears.

 _Thank you thank you thank you_ , she thinks, though she doesn't know to whom she's addressing that thanks. If there was ever a God, he has long since turned his back on her.

"Hey," Jo says, squeezes her arm. Her voice is hoarse, screamed-out.

Anna opens her eyes, lifts her arms to pull Jo into a tight hug, presses her face to the crook of Jo's neck. She smells of sweat, gunpowder, gasoline, blood – war smells, Croatoan smells – and, underneath that, of herself. Something simple, unique and untainted. It makes tears prick at the insides of Anna's eyelids.

After a moment, Jo slaps her back lightly. "Let's go inside, okay? I'm frozen and I want out of this rain."

It's barely any warmer inside the cabin, but it's at least dry, and when Anna's turned on the low-energy lamp and lit a few candles, light. Jo sits down on the bed, kicks off her mud-coated combat boots, shucks off the over-sized army surplus jacket, its green long-since lost under layer upon layer of stains. She unstraps the gun from her hip, the knife in its sheath at her thigh, takes off the belts of ammunition looped around her waist, then her patched-up jeans, so she's sitting there in just her threadbare black t-shirt and grey boxers. Her hair's a greasy tangle, she's covered in mud and blood and grime, her eyes are sunken and shadowed, and she's the most beautiful thing Anna's ever seen.

There's a bandage wrapped around her left arm, just above the elbow. Anna brushes her fingers over it lightly. "You want me to change the dressing on this for you?"

"It really needs stitching," Jo rasps. "Dean cleaned it up, I figured it'd be better if I waited for someone who's actually slept in the last three days to do it." She looks up, smiles thinly. "'Sides, you always do it the best."

Anna palms her hair, smiles back. "Okay."

She keeps what she calls her surgery kit under the bed, next to the shotgun and the silver-plated knife and vials of holy water and holy oil. It started out well, supplies begged-borrowed-or-stolen from hospitals, but the last of the iodine ran out last spring and now she's down to nothing but vodka and dental floss. Butchery, really, but she's the best they've got.

The cut on Jo's arm is ragged and looks pretty painful, but it's nothing like the worst injury Anna's patched up. Nothing like the worst of _Jo's_ injuries that she's patched up.

Jo's breath catches when Anna douses the cut in vodka, but she grits her teeth, gets through it like a trooper. When it's finished, she lets out a long, long groan, collapses down so she's lying sprawled out over the blankets, hair spread around her head like an unwashed halo.

Anna stows the box back under the bed, then takes off her leather jacket and lies down beside Jo, pressed up along her side, a leg thrown over hers, pulls the blankets up to cover them both. Jo's skin is like ice, the sheets and blankets chill and clammy. Silence hangs frosty between them. The cold is almost a physical presence, as though Lucifer himself has crawled into bed alongside them.

"We lost Kansas City," Jo says, after a pause that could have been seconds, could have been forever. "Army made the call. Sealed off the city."

It's not a surprise to Anna, not after seeing the look on Dean Winchester's face as he got out of that car. Not after five years of watching the world come to pieces at the seams. Kansas City was an outpost that held out much, much longer than most, the unlikeliest of last bastions, but it was always doomed. If there was ever a point in time when they could have turned back the tide of Lucifer's campaign, it's long gone.

She can't say any of this to Jo. That there are some things you _just do not say_ has always been a cardinal rule of humans, and it's truer than ever in Chitaqua. Everyone has their own pretences they have to be allowed to maintain, in order to keep going. Anna's no different herself.

Instead she presses her lips to the curve of Jo's neck, where the pulse beats defiantly under the skin. Jo exhales hard, chest heaving. She clutches at the back of Anna's head, fingers tangling in her damp hair.

"I thought you were dead," Anna confesses, voice low.

Her hand creeps up under Jo's shirt, to stroke over the ripple of scar tissue down the back of her right shoulder. It's a remnant of the early days of the apocalypse, before Croatoan was unleashed: they'd been in Kansas, Stull Cemetery, when sheets of fire fell from a cloudless blue sky. The burn on Jo's shoulder, agonising as it was, hadn't been life-threatening, but the infection that laid her low days later was. Anna had been so sure she would die, they'd all been so sure, Jo thrashing in sweat-soaked sheets, fever raging above forty degrees. No hospitals open, no antibiotics, no Grace to chase the contagion from her blood – and yet she'd pulled through, a miracle all of her own making.

"You were gone so long, I thought you were never coming back." Anna's voice shakes, threatens to break, and she hides her face, tucking it into the hollow where Jo's throat meets her shoulder. How is it that one human, one soul, can mean so much?

"Hey, hey, Anna." Jo rolls over, pushes up on her hands and knees so she's on top of Anna, looming over her. Her strong cold fingers grip at Anna's chin, tugging her around to look up at Jo. "I'm here. I'm still here."

One hand runs over Anna's face, fingers digging in, a little rough, a little possessive. Jo's dark eyes, shadowed and bloodshot, are fierce. Everything else these days – every _one_ else – is washed-out and faded, a world that's long past its sell-by date, but not Jo. Not Jo.

Anna wraps one arm around Jo's waist, the other reaching up to hold onto her scarred shoulder, pull her down for a kiss. Jo lets her take her weight, their bodies slotted together ankle to waist.

The heat of Jo's mouth is shocking, sudden, makes Anna's breath catch. She presses Anna back against the pillows, nips at her bottom lip, fists a hand in her hair and holds her down. The kiss is hungry with the desperate relief of being here, being alive. They could kiss like this forever and it wouldn't be long enough.

Abruptly, Jo breaks the kiss, pulling back and rearing up to stare down at Anna. It puts more weight on her hips, pushing them down against Anna's, and Anna can't help but squirm a little in response, gasp for more.

Jo smiles, and it's a hard smile, flinty, but a genuine one. Her grip is firm in Anna's hair, holding her still. She says, hoarse and throaty, "We can still do this. We're _gonna_ do this. Get the Colt, kill Lucifer – we're gonna win, Anna." She pulls at Anna's hair, kisses her again, hot and forceful. "We _are_."

Her face is drawn tight, hard. There are little tension tremors running through her, and Anna can feel every one of them where their bodies are pressed together. She strokes the pads of her fingers over Jo's lips, down the side of her throat, along the too-sharp jut of her collarbones. The neckline of her t-shirt is tugged to one side, revealing the anti-possession tattoo, and beneath that, in shaky, hand-inked dark blue, _5.2.12,_ the date of Bobby and Ellen's deaths.

It's in the nature of angels to be fatalistic, to accept the truth and bow to the inevitable. They are created to obey - Anna had commanded the Garrison, but the Archangels had commanded her, and even the Archangels claimed to be commanded by God. It's in the nature of humanity to rebel, to fight, to _hope_. Anna's been both, been neither, in her time. She's made her choices, and now she lives with them.

She ghosts her fingers over Jo's lips, flushed and a little swollen. "I believe you," she tells her, and Jo leans down to kiss her again.


End file.
